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The idea is to implement the garden game idea from the ideas page. The game will involve the player starting on a barren planetoid with the aim of “terraforming” it with plants and trees. The seeds and fruits will be traded with other players with each player starting with a randomly generated seed to encourage trading of seeds with other players in order to collect all the plant types.
The trading will involve players placing items in a centralized area that runs on the server with each player accessing it through XMPP. The main idea being that this way I can XMAPP in PySoy through making the game so that it supports games with social aspects. I think that this is an important feature for tablet and mobile users especially.

Work description

Prep work (21st of April)
The main thing with this game is the networking aspect so this will be the main focus of my research. I´m on my 5th year of a telecommunication engineering degree so I think concentrating on this aspect suits my background. Also I´ll use this time to explore how the framework works and get to grips with all that it can do, of course.

Mid-Term (23rd of June)
By this time I hope to have the basic networking functions with XMPP working with PySoy and a proof of concept so people can try it out and give feedback/suggestions.

Final (22nd of August)
The game should be created to show off using XMPP with PySoy Also I´ll make a tutorial on how to make games that incorporate XMPP.

Game Description

The game´s premise is to turn a barren land into a garden with various plants and trees until the land is considered fit to live in. To achieve this goal it´ll be necessary to trade with other players’ seeds and fruit online to get enough variety in the player’s garden.

As far as the classes needed for the game it will require the use of XMPP and the following:
• Atoms: Position, Rotation, Vector
• Audio: Output
• Bodies: Billboard, Light
• Controllers: Pointer, Keyboard, BaseNavigator?
• Scenes: Scene
• Textures: Texture
The art style will be quite cartoony with a character developed from the following concept art:

The idea is that he won´t be able to breath at first until there are enough trees grown to create a breathable atmosphere, hence the space suit.
To show what the game will eventually look like when finished, here is a mockup of a typical screen:

Here we see a few plants that have grown, a few trees and the player tilling the land. The end game consists of meeting various criteria designed to make the player think of variety and get them to trade seeds and fruit with each other.

Experience

I´ve never used PySoy before now but I have been making games since I was kid, starting at the age of twelve with Dark Basic. I then moved onto DarkGDK which was in C++ (well, mostly C). After that I started uni where I learnt Java, and used C. Last year I did a course on the Python language (2.7) for uni credits and this year I´m using Python on the Raspberry Pi board as part of my project.
More about the degree can be found here: http://etsiitforos.ugr.es/planes/index.php under Ingeniero de Telecomunicación. The subject I haven´t finished is called Antenas y Propagación. The project I´m doing involves controlling a Raspberry Pi robots from a webpage.

Goals

The goals I want to achieve with the garden game are demonstrating how to implement games with social aspects using XMPP and improving the engine to allow other games to be made in the engine. Also getting a fun game out of the process would be a nice bonus.